Welcome to Year 4!
We are off to another great start in year 4 with yet another group of terrific children! We have just reached the end of our first month and already we have done so many wonderful things and produced lots of fantastic work!
P4S had three visits to Limavady town library where they learnt a lot about the benefits of the library and all the services and resources it offers to our community. They also learnt how to use the library and any children who had not already joined have now become members and are enjoying taking out lots of new and interesting books. P4Mc have this all to look forward to in November.
We have also started our Accelerated Reader Programme and the benefits of this scheme were very noticeable last year. The children's enjoyment and ability in reading vastly improved and we hope to see the same again this year.
In Numeracy we have learnt a great deal already too! There are quite a few maths whizz kids this year! We have done lots of work on numbers up to 1000 and learnt new strategies to help us become quicker and more confident in mental maths activities! We will be having an evening later this term to help parents to understand these strategies and to therefore be able to support their children with their maths. Things have changed quite a bit recently! We place a lot of focus on problem solving activities in P4 and we try to make this as fun as possible through group activities, games and challenges!
In year 4 we do literacy tasktime, so the children rotate through a variety of fun and engaging tasks each day. We have done a lot of work on alphabetical order, phonics, capital letters and full stops and comprehension tasks using a variety of genres of writing. This term we are going to concentrate on Narrative Writing and we will be writing stories with a familiar setting but a very extraordinary character! We will make our stories into books with a front cover and a blurb at the back.
The children began weekly Spanish lessons with Montserrat in Year 3 and these lessons have continued this year! Each week they thoroughly look forward to learning new Spanish words and phrases through songs, games and drama.
In Year 4 we greatly encourage an active and healthy lifestyle and the children bring in a healthy break and water each day. In PE we are currently focussing on running and on improving our technique, agility and endurance. We also benefit from weekly visits from an IFA coach and he is teaching the children about the fundamental skills associated with football. They absolutely love this time!
Our topic this term is 'Changes'. Through this topic we will look at seasonal changes occurring around us at the moment. We will also look at how the children have changed and have fun finding out what they were like as babies and looking at old photos. We will also be looking at how our local area has changed over the last hundred years and find out memories from our family members. We will take a historical walk of the town and look at old and new buildings and listen to memories from the teachers and a local historian! We will take a look at how much daily life has changed in the last century and indeed how different school is now compared to that of their parents or grandparents day! We will also do lots of experiments and investigations to see how various materials change. And best of all, we get to bake up a lovely sweet treat using produce from our own school grounds and enjoy what we have made!!
We are very much looking forward to having a great Autumn term!
